Beijing has just been awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics. Here is a photo of the mountain that will host the skiing courses, taken in the middle of January this year. You may notice a slight lack of white stuff.

21 July 2015

China is already home to some of the most quickly growing megacities in the world. Now there’s a plan to officially merge several megacities around Beijing into one super-megacity that will house the equivalent of a third of the US population in an area that’s almost the geographical size of Victoria, Australia.

26 February 2015

Apparently, our New Year’s Eve ain’t got nothing on Chinese New Year in Beijing. This video was recorded on an aeroplane that was landing in Beijing at midnight of Chinese New Year and it shows all the fireworks going off at once across the city. It looks like every corner is firing off explosions at the same time.

25 February 2015

Check out Beijing’s new airport terminal by Zaha Hadid: 700,000 square metres in total, with an 80,000 square metre ground transportation centre. It kind of looks like the mother of New Mexico’s spaceport, from where Virgin Galactic operates.

16 January 2015

The worst smog of the year so far swept into Beijing this week, coating the city in a grainy, deep grey murk on par with what the city endured in 2013, pictured above (though you’ll see it’s popping up again today). China is trying, hard, to get its air quality problem under control, and is considering some seriously wacky ways to do it. Unfortunately, the only one that will work is also the most difficult.

23 April 2014

For prospective car buyers and automobile fans everywhere, motor shows are like Christmas. It’s where manufacturers show off their newest modelsm teasing us with exciting concepts which will never see the light of day. To save you from trawling through the numerous boring new arrivals, I’ve selected the most interesting new whips from New York and Beijing’s shows of the past week.

22 April 2014

Beijing is one thirsty city. Its population of 22 million consumes barely 100 cubic metres of water per capita — one fifth the international water-shortage level — thanks to a chronic drought in the nation’s north. But this massive desalination plant could help supply a third of the city’s water singlehandedly.

22 March 2014

China’s debilitating smog problem isn’t anything new at this point — at least for its residents. Tourists to Beijing, however, are still struggling with the fact that the sights they came for can often be virtually unseeable. To appease this growing group of angry travellers, China’s biggest online travel agency now offers smog insurance.

27 February 2014

The alarmingly thickcloud of smog often found floating over China’s capital city is nothing new at this point. But as the situation continues to worsen, Chinese scientists are warning that the city’s toxic air pollution has become so dire that it now resembles a nuclear winter.